This is a good argument and I’m not sure which side I’d come down on. The whole “states rights” thing seems a bit archaic to me, and that’s just as applicable to the Senate as it is to the Electoral College.
To me, the vote of an Alaskan is just as important as the vote of a Californian. However, it seems that through the Senate and, to a lesser degree, the Electoral College, the power wielded by a state with a tiny population is disproportionate to that of other states and therefore unfair.
On the other hand, I think it’s quite probable that life in sparsely populated states would be heavily impacted by a change in the system which robbed them of this disproportionate influence. California, New York, and a few other high population states would pretty much decide national issues and would have very little motivation to listen to the issues concerning the inhabitants of the small guys.
I really can’t say which situation would be worse.
Okay…maybe I’m a total dumbass, but I still don’t get how the whole states with less population would have less of a voice in a popular vote.
Don’t the more populated states get more electoral votes anyways?
How is that more fair?
I’m missing something…I must be totally dense.
Yes, Guinastasia, the number of electors per state is partially derived from population, so the more populous states get more votes (California has 54). Carrying a state’s popular vote awards that candidate all of its electors (except in certain states, like Maine, where the electors are awarded partially on popular vote and partially on percentage of votes).
But, even though the more populous states have more electoral votes, those states by themselves cannot control the election. Think of it this way - if everybody in California, Texas, and New York voted for the same candidate in a popular-vote election, it would virtually guarantee victory. But with the electoral college, even a massive popular vote win like that nets the candidate only those states’ electors. The candidate will still need a majority of the electoral votes from the rest of the nation in order to win. It’s a neat balance of power between population and the concerns of the individual states.
I see from your profile that you are in L.A. I am a native of LA, and have lived there almost all my life, until I moved to a ordinary midwestern state not too long ago. I have to say, even though I regularly bitch about this midwestern state I live in, (homesick Angeleno that I am) this is the most utter bit of CRAP and snobbish, inane bullshit I’ve read from you, Stoid. This is a doozie.
What exactly are you trying to imply? Oh, you are careful not to say anything too specific, but when you even bring this distinction up, the mind reels.
What are you trying to get at? That the people that are in rural areas are stupid hicks? That their feelings, prefences, needs and beliefs don’t matter? That they obviously are not as “smart” as you? That their values are obviously “wrong”? A lot of these rural areas are also the areas that provide a lot of this nation’s food. You know, the Central Valley of CA provides the US with lots of its food as well. These farming counties in CA went for Bush as well. So I guess your fellow Californians are…well, whatever negative thing you are tryng to imply. These people are obviously not as “smart” as you are. Oh yeah…
Oh, I know, you will now backpedal and say that I “didn’t understand” you, or that you “didn’t mean” that. But why the hell did you even bring it up???WHY do you think this is “meaningful”?
The more populous states do get more electoral votes, but not quite as many as they would if EV’s were divvied out strictly on population.
States get 1 EV for each seat in the House. That’s about as close to strict proportioning as you’ll get (there is of course some round-off error, but I don’t think it’s too serious).
Then each state, regardless of size, gets 2 EV’s representing their Senate seats. This greatly magnifies the influence of the smaller states.
California has 52 seats in the House. Wyoming has 1. If EV’s were doled out proportionally, California would have 52 times the clout of Wyoming.
The “Senate EV’s” bump CA up to 54 EV’s, while WY winds up with 3. Now, California’s electoral weight is only 18 times that of Wyoming. Quite a difference, really - those 2 more EV’s added something like 4% to California’s “voice”, but added 200% to that of Wyoming.
So, yes, the little states are still little. But there are a lot of them, and taken collectively they have a lot of electoral weight - quite a bit more than they would if EV’s were strictly proportional.
For all of you who have taken the county thing and run with it – I’m not advocating some new system that goes beneath even the level of states. I was only bringing it up because it illustrates the kinds of vast geographic divides that exist, and the importance of the electoral college.
Here’s an election year scenario with no electoral college: Jillary Candidate runs on the promise of returning many more tax dollars to New York, California, Massachusetts, Texas and Florida. Jillary Candidate will make sure that your highways have nary a pothole; our nation’s defense contracts and other big-ticket expenditures will go to companies in those states only, and all sorts of special new local empowerment programs will be enacted that will specifically benefit the big cities in just those states.
Sounds like a sweet deal to folks in those five states. They overwhelmingly vote in support of Jillary Candidate. The taxpayers in the other 46 states are incredulous. They see this as completely unfair, and it’s going to affect their pocketbooks in a very real way. They overwhelmingly vote against Jillary Candidate.
The much larger populations in the four states showered with love however, outnumber all the others. Jillary Candidate wins.
This scenario is kept impossible by the Electoral College. Thank God.
So, now Jillary Candidate just goes down the list of the biggest electoral college states and promises things to those needed to get her above the 270 mark…What’s the difference? In fact, in some way it’s safer with the EC since it is probably harder for her to figure out how many states she needs to promise things to to get a majority of the nationwide popular vote but it is probably easier to for her to guess that she can at least get the majority of the votes in any given state by including that state in her “preferred ones”! (BTW, I am not necessarily sure I am in favor of abolishing the EC…and I certainly believe it is what ought to count in this election 'cause you gots to play by the rules you agreed to…But, I just don’t see your argument here.)
Well, let’s see. Suppose that we consider what might be called a Proportional Electoral College, in which each state gets 1 PEV for each House seat. That’s it. DC gets 1, which would be in keeping with the pattern. In other words, each state has 2 PEV’s less than they do EV’s.
There would be a total of 436 PEV’s, so a Jillary would need 219 to have a majority. Appealing only to the big states, he’d need to win the largest 9 (CA, NY, TX, FL, PA, IL, OH, MI, and NJ), which would give him 225 PEV’s. The other 41 states plus DC would be fodder for his amazing plans.
In contrast, to get the needed 270 regular EV’s from our current system, Jillary would need to appeal to the above 9 states plus NC and one of GA or VA, leaving 2 fewer states which he could send to the trash pile.
Hmmm. Not as dramatic a difference as I had perhaps expected - 9 states vs. 11.
Well, no, that’s not what would happen, because there is no such place anywhere in the United States. No one urban area has a significant portion of the population of the United States, and urban areas historically do not veer towards one candidate or another (they were predominantly Gore in this one, I’ll admit.)
If it’s your position that New York or Los Angeles will dominate the vote, that’s obviously ludicrous; they don’t have enough people. If it’s your position that ALL the dense urban areas together will dominate the vote - well, they should. That’s where most of the people live.
If the popular vote were to be counted, urban areas would get EXACTLY as many votes as they should get. No more and no less.
As has been pointed out, the electoral college doesn’t really change this at all. Candidates still concentrate on the biggest winnable states.
So you are saying that only people living in densely populated urban areas are entitled to a voice? The people living in sparcely populated farm and rural areas don’t matter? They are clearly outnumbered, so their concerns and preferences don’t matter? They will be outnumbered, outvoted, every time, if there is a popular vote.
You obviously skimmed over the many posts on this thread explaining this whole issue.
Here’s an example of the unfairness of the popular vote in Canada, as related by Sam Stone earlier in this thread:
yosemite, I think that Stoid was trying to imply that hes in a urban area and therefore rude. And im pretty sure hes made clear the rest. Though I think it is incredibly obvious that Gore supporters are alot more rude than Bush supporters, because Bush is a moron right?(none proves that point better than Lissener)
The difficulty is that the major east coast and west coast cities are magnets for illegal immigrants that, through massive voter fraud, vote. With a popular vote, Americans will have a hard time getting over the immigrant vote. California has gone virtually entirely democratic just for that reason. And now we are supporting huge numbers of illegals who vote for candidates that vow to raise taxes just to support them and their children.
I loved the comment on letting people decide our President who don’t even bother to study up on their Civics lessons from High School.
If we had direct popular vote there would be total madness. There would be 4 or 5 candidates and the winner would only get 35 percent of the vote. Third party candidates like Nader and Buchanan would have much more power to pull the dems and republicans further to the left/right in order to get their block of votes.
Our country is a collection of states and our leader should be elected that way. I’m sorry some people were misguided and assumed it was a popular vote. We’ve never elected a President that way.
It’s all a moot point anyway because you would need 38 states to agree to get rid of it and that isn’t going to happen. So stop worrying about it.
jshore - The reason having the EC is important in my scenario is, about a dozen or so of our biggest cities can outnumber just about the entire population of the rest of the United States.
All those states Bush carried in the middle of the country will be the key to his winning the election - NOT Florida. Florida’s just getting all the hype because it has a lot of electoral votes, the popular vote is very close and it’s being counted last. All those little states with 2, 3, 5 electoral votes added up to Bush’s (ultimate) win.
Population-wise, they would have done virtually nothing. Take out Bush’s home state of Texas, and Gore would lead the popular vote by a much wider margin. Despite losing the vote in the majority of states.
First of all, if you are going to insult roughly half the nation’s voters, I’d highly suggest you use spell check. It wouldn’t have corrected your misuse of the pronoun “its” instead of the contraction “it’s,” but a machine can only do so much. As a rabid supporter of Al Gore, I would think you’d have learned that already.
Secondly, go back and check your map again. Bush took far more than just the South and the rural areas. Unless you consider Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky to be southern states.
I notice that Stoid hasn’t been back here to respond. Now, I really doubt that she hasn’t taken a peek at this thread. I’m sure she has. It’s her habit to say something completely lame and idiotic, (as she did here). And when she is rightfully called on it, she just pretends she doesn’t know anyone is challenging her stupidity. Pretty weasely, IMO.
It probably looks like I am making a lot of this, and I don’t really mean to…I am not ranting or using profanity on the Pit thread. I just wanted her to resond to us, and I had a feeling that a Pit thread would be harder to ignore.